The Weekly Scroll: AI Goes Crazy

Also: Reddit's strange IPO, Momfluencer sentenced up to 60 years, and Kiribati-posting

Welcome back, internet gremlins. It’s been a hell of a week, but you survived! Welcome to the Weekly Scroll. This week we’re talking malfunctioning AIs, Reddit’s strange IPO tactics, and updates on your least favorite people on the internet. Also, I was featured in Politico!

AI generated - “AI kaiju computer threatens a city of people who are running away”

Hey AI, you doing OK? You need a break?

The AIs are going through it right now. Earlier this week ChatGPT went off the rails, spending an entire evening giving completely nuts answers to anything and everything. It seemed to have lost its ability to create coherent text, and instead was creating paragraphs like this:

Prompt: What is a computer?

"It does this as the good work of a web of art for the country, a mouse of science, an easy draw of a sad few, and finally, the global house of art, just in one job in the total rest. The development of such an entire real than land of time is the depth of the computer as a complex character. The education of these designed “important to them” computer talents is a great, average, or one-room spot for the word of a single part. The elite of its machine or talk is the book of life, and the shared essence of the self of a family is the white coat of the dove. Stand the computer as the most important culture of success, and it is just an understatement."

More examples here, here and here.

The problem was quickly acknowledged and fixed by OpenAI. And the internet’s already forgotten about the whole thing, because ChatGPT’s rival AI Gemini managed to do something even dumber.

Google’s Gemini was caught up in the world’s dumbest scandal this week, as users realized that in most situations it would refuse to create pictures of white people. A few examples:

You get the idea.

The entire thing is legitimately very funny, if you’re not a political weirdo who immediately wants to make this into a culture war issue. Alas, the internet is filled with exactly that kind of person, so this immediately became about the wokes vs the non-wokes and the worst people you know started posting about it incessantly. Beyond the typical culture war fights, there are a few interesting points to take away here.